The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Network administrators use a variety of tools to monitor networks. Current tools expose network administrators to many different interfaces, data formats, processes and levels of granularity for monitoring network resources and traffic. Thus, network administrators are required to learn how to use many different tools to perform network monitoring tasks and to collect needed metrics.
Moreover, current network monitoring tools are pre-configured to support only a limited number of predefined metrics. Thus, if a network administrator needs to monitor network information or collect network metrics that are different than the predefined metrics supported by a particular network monitoring tool, the network administrator must find another tool to collect the needed metrics or request an update from the network monitoring tool vendor.